7 hours/week email challenge

I recently surveyed some members of our team to find out how many hours a week they were spending on email. They, and other business colleagues I asked, all came back to say they spend more than two hours a day, or ten hours a week, managing email.

How much time do you spend on work email each week? If you’re not sure, you can use a tool like RescueTime to find out.

Everyone agreed that ten hours a week, 20% or more of work weeks, was too much given roles and our other priorities. We admitted that we had gotten lazy and allowed a number of bad habits to fester turning email into a time monster. What if we could reduce the hours spent on email by 30%? The opportunity to reclaim a few hours a week was motivating and we agreed to a challenge – to reduce time spent on email to less than 7 hours/week. Want to join us?

Oh, but how do we do it? Is it possible? We all agreed it’s possible. Whether we succeed is a matter of how disciplined we are in changing old habits and embracing new techniques. Here are the top five bad habits or new techniques we’re focusing on:

1. Do not stay in the email stream all day. Schedule time for email. We’re spending one hour on email every morning and 20 minutes every afternoon. The morning session is to clear out the inbox and the afternoon session is to be attentive to time sensitive emails that cannot wait until the next morning.
2. Communicate expectations regarding email response time. As a general rule, we commit to respond to emails within one business day. This allows you to do #1. If everyone expects you to respond to emails as soon as you see them, your email manages you rather than the other way around.
3. Use instant messaging, phone calls and face to face conversations whenever you can instead of email. For us, instant messaging is our real-time communication solution, which is much easier to manage having open all day long compared to email. Phone calls and face to face conversations are for anything urgent or where email is inappropriate (e.g. message would be too lengthy, would generate an excessive number of replies or text alone is insufficient for the message to be conveyed).
4. Never touch an email twice. When reviewing a message, act on it, whether that means filing it, deleting it, completing or delegating a task or scheduling an event. A zero inbox is possible!
5. Aggressively automate the management of your email. Setup rules, unsubscribe from newsletters you rarely read and use your junk filter.

Let me know if you’re accepting the challenge. Come back and share how you’re progressing and what tools or techniques you find helpful.